Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to electronic circuits and, more specifically, to circuits using a flash memory. The present disclosure more particularly aims at the management of data storage in a flash memory.
Description of the Related Art
Flash memories are increasingly used in microcontrollers to non-volatilely store data.
Data storage in a flash memory has various time constraints due to the granularity of the operations performed, the writing and the reading being performed by byte, while the erasing is performed by page.
In certain applications, it is desired to ascertain that the transactions performed and stored respect an atomic criterion. The atomicity of a transaction corresponds to ascertaining that data stored in a memory effectively have a known, utilizable state. This amounts to ascertaining that data in the non-volatile memory either maintain their state before the transaction or have their state after the concerned transaction, but that they do not have an intermediate state.
The management of the transaction atomicity is particularly used in applications where an interruption of the circuit power supply or the occurrence of an incidental or intentional disturbance may generate the storage of data in a state which makes them either impossible to subsequently process or vulnerable in terms of confidentiality.
Many atomicity management techniques, more particularly in microcontrollers applied to so-called security transactions, for example, bank transactions, access control, etc., are known.